You don\’t have to spend a lot for that smarthome.

Welcome

Welcome to IVB's Home Theater and Home Automation blog. I hope you enjoy reading about how i'm building my own smart home using art from VladStudio.com, an Elk automation panel, and the CQC HA/HT software engine.

Cool HA voice stuff done

Ideas implemented in the last 24 hours:1) Sound/Voice StuffWell, I got ideas from 3 different folks in 3 different forums, but in typical IVB fashion I went waaay over the top with it. Well, I only got the basics done to-date, but i’m setup well for future.
1a) Custom sound playback over HA Elk speakers for callerID. I recorded my M.I.L.’s voice saying “it’s me, why aren’t you picking up the phone”, and that’ll get played everytime the phone rings and CID says it’s her. Plus, since i’m using a PC, i’ve got unlimited .WAV capacity, so I can record a different voice/.WAV file for each person.
My wife gets bugged because if the phone rings, I *never* move to get it – 90% of the time it’s for her. She always yells at me saying it could be the one time someone calls for me, but now we’ll hear it and not in that generic ass M$ TTS voice. I told the wife about this, in typical wife form she shrugged her shoulders and asked why we need it.
Doesn’t she know by now? It’s not for her, it’s for me, and so I don’t have to do anything when the phone rings and it’s her.

1b) Ripped out doorchime, ran wires to Elk for custom doorbell ring. That’s boring, but i’ve been meaning to do something similar for a year now, since i was redoing the wiring for all the speakers i just got off my ass to do it.

1c) Bought a mixer so that I can re-use those same speakers for the Elk M1 output, PC (both TTS and custom WAV), whatever else I want.

Now I know all that’s pretty straight-forward, but I think it’s pretty impressive since I had to run all new wiring for the Elk speakers that those are running through. Plus I got the wiring done for adding another 3 speakers hooked up to the relays. This lays the groundwork for both
– Intruder warning on any non-alarm violation (ie, motion in entryway or backdoor detected)
– RFID greeting when it sees me come home

2) Nuvo Concerto control over CQC.Given that I can now trap that a particular keypad pressed a button in CQC, i set it up so that pressing the AUX button will run the same weather script that we have going off in the AM.

3) Keyfob control– got the keyfob hooked into CQC. I won’t do remote disarms with it, but i did link the lighting button tonight. It’ll be one of those things I gotta sit with to see what I want to do with it.